Metamorphoses
by icor
Summary: Seven hundred and sixtyfour days later, and things are changing: in fact, she's breathing again. And it's like she was never taken away in the first place. Unfortunately, Aerith understands this all too well. [multipart]


**Notes: **I have nothing against Advent Children; I just don't particularly like the canon, so I haven't included it. At the moment this makes no difference whatsoever, and probably isn't going to affect the story in the slightest.

Anyway, this is only the prologue. Any and all feedback would be loved!

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_Metamorphoses _

_Prologue_

Aerith Gainsborough had left life suddenly and gracelessly, died and then drowned, closed her eyes for the last time and then not slept for seven hundred and sixty-four days after that.

Life had been hard, but death was harder; always too conscious to move away from other souls, too kind not to help them remember, and far too willing to trade their suffering for her soft words. When her eyes finally opened she was blinded by pure white light—Lifestream?—and felt its tendrils wrapped around her body, holding her down to the ground.

There were knives running through her, jagged from her chest to her throat, and the pain only eased when she realised it was nothing more than oxygen coursing through her, cold and strange. She lay there, dancing on the edge of consciousness for longer than her mind could register, learning to keep eyes open for seconds at a time.

Aerith wasn't sure what to take in first: to notice the way her surroundings were actually quite dim once her eyes were under her control once more, or the fact that she was _breathing_, and oh, dead people just didn't _breathe_.

Her eyes, it seemed, still needed time to learn to see again, and her senses had to reline from their current state of synaesthesia—colours of what should be the Lifestream wrapped around blurred before her, until, finally, she realised that the real Lifestream had been cut from her like a lifeline.

They were arms around her; arms that had caught her before.

A formless whisper fled her lips as she finally locked onto him: face the same as it had been (or was it more worn and scarred?) hair the same as it had been (surely it was much duller now?) and eyes the same as ever (oh, they burnt brightly still). If her own eyes hadn't been in the habit of deceiving her, she might have been able to pick apart the differences in expression; concern and heart-stopping fear were not necessarily the same thing.

She tried to speak again and failed, but strength came from somewhere. The sudden movement made her stomach turn and her head spin, but her arms weaved around him, just as he had been supporting her before. 

She clung to him with all she had, as close as she could bring herself, and barely noticing when arms didn't hold her too. It all made her want to weep, and she couldn't tell if it was sorrow, joy, or something in between. A dream, perhaps; she might had finally fallen into a sleep somewhere in the planet's depths. In the end, it didn't matter if this was reality or not—the breathing, the seeing, the pain; that much was true.

The touch made her heart miss a beat, and it was surprisingly painful to jerk something that had only just started working again. His hands pressed gently against her shoulders, pushing her away so she was face to face with him.

"Are you alright, miss?" he asked, face a mixture of confusion and worry.

If speaking hadn't been difficult enough already, this new revelation made sure that words caught in her throat and choked her as her lips moved. He was patient though, sitting back and waiting for an answer, one hand still on her shoulder.

And after some minutes of deep breaths and shaking hands, she looked up to him, and said all she could.

"Cloud?"

He blinked once, twice, but still didn't understand how she knew his name. Frowning he pushed himself up with his feet and looked down at the girl sitting on the cold ground, soaking wet.

"Do I..." he paused for a moment, looking at her long and hard, to make sure there were no misunderstandings. "Know you?"

And Aerith, still not adjusted to the world of the living, neither said or did anything. Not a nod, a smile, or a word of conformation; nothing. It wasn't until the Cloud-turned-stranger knelt down before her and pulled a handkerchief out of his coat sleeve she realised she had taken his words so hard.

"I'm sorry," he said, not really sure of the whats and whys behind his apology, "Here, wipe your eyes miss."

Aerith took the cloth gratefully and brushed it across her face. It did little good—her entire body was drenched—but the gesture behind it was still there. He looked at her sympathetically, and she didn't like it at all.

He rose to his feet once more, slight agitation in his step, and pulled his coat off in haste. She closed her eyes from both kinds of exhaustion, and didn't open them even when she felt it fall over her shoulders and her body stopped shaking.

"Why are you here?" she asked through the silence, no thanks in her voice.

Cloud crossed his arms.

"Passing through to the Norther Crater," he explained slowly, not really confident in his own words. "This old city seemed like a shortcut, and then I found you by the lake a few hours ago."

"And you've been here since then?"

He nodded. "I gave you some potions, but I don't think they really helped all that much."

She opened her eyes slowly, half-expecting for her surrounds to have changed, for Cloud to have taken another form. But no; they were still there, on the edge of the Forgotten City, by the Holy Lake that had made a sorry grave for her. And Cloud was still Cloud, of course; what else could he be?

If she had her mother's white materia she would have held it between her fingers and prayed for an explaination—a world like the one that had once been her own, and a man like the one she used to know.

"Have you come by here before?" Aerith asked, curious and expecting the worse.

"Passed through a few times. I've never had any real reason to come here before—I didn't even know there were people still here, and—"

Aerith stopped hearing at this point, refused to take in the words that told her she was living without an existence. After all the battles and heartache, had she really been forgotten so easily?

"H-hey," she suddenly heard Cloud say as he shook her shoulder. "I asked you how you got here."

"I woke up."

"Woke up?"

"Yes," she lied.

"Up and out of that lake?"

She tugged her wet hair. "Seems so, Cloud."

The name caught him off guard, and he hesitated so sharply that he lost his words. He simply stood there, guilty for something that possibly couldn't be his fault, his mind drawing blanks when he tried to come to a conclusion.

"What's your name?" Cloud asked finally, his voice a little rougher than he would have liked. "Seeing as you already know mine..."

Aerith smiled sadly; last time, she had had to wait to ask that question. Cloud was getting better at these things then, it seemed.

"I'm Aerith, the flower girl." Word for word, perfect. Still, there was no recognition in his eyes.

"Aerith? Like the earth?"

"Like the earth."

---

Cloud wasn't sure what to do with the girl. He had spent the last however-long they had been sitting staring and wondering, staring and wondering, trying to remember just where he might know her from. Perhaps she had owned an inn or some such in one of the villages or small towns they had passed through. Maybe she was a merchant's daughter who he had brought a box of potions from.

It was evident that _she_ knew him; why else would she call him by his name? Cloud only felt bad he couldn't remember her. He titled his head and watched her through the small fire he had made by the lake.

Aerith was sitting there, his last full bottle in her hands and tearing through it as if water was going out of fashion. She stopped every once in a while, scowling at the bottle and pulling faces as if it was hurting her to drink. Strange, really. She was drinking an awful lot for someone that had just climbed out of a lake.

The girl was soaked, her clothes were ripped and dull, and yet she was smiling.

"Aerith..." he called across the flames, and she looked up at him. "Is there somewhere you can go?"

Of course, even if he didn't know her there was no way Cloud could leave her in the middle of an abandoned city on her own; it just wasn't right. She looked thoughtful for a moment, almost as if she was trying to recall something she hadn't had to remember for a long time.

And the, quite decisively, she replied, "To Tifa's!"

Cloud looked startled. "You know Tifa?" he asked, rising to his feet.

Aerith nodded, only hoping that Tifa hadn't forgotten her too. Either way, it would be good just to be able to see her again; after all, it was good to see Cloud after so long, even when she now meant nothing to him.

He never really changed. Aerith couldn't help but feel that he'd be just as awkward around her, even if he had his memories. _Especially_ if he had his memories. But all that mattered was that Cloud was still Cloud, and she was still Aerith. Not much else mattered.


End file.
